I am in you, you are in me

Tonight I offer a re-post of an article that I came across today. As I continue to mourn and work through what losing a child means, this post has just blown my mind.

Laura Grace Weldon writes about how fetal stem cells from children carried by a mother, born or unborn, stay with the mother throughout her life. I think I can attest to the feeling of this. This article communicates the science of it.

And though the science is unclear, what she describes is the fetal cells acting on the mother's behalf throughout life, to aid in healing and fighting disease. Wow.

The level of interdependence I have felt as a mother, particularly in early pregnancy, and with nursing in the first years, is something that has taught me so much by way of humility and awe. Newly pregnant, the feelings and sensations of the body being pulled through a hormonal roller coaster are palpable, at least for me. And the hormonal feedback of oxytocin in nursing was a powerful bonding agent for me, and became a primary source of energy to keep me going through those tough indeed first months and years.

As my son grows, we enter into a dance of distance and closeness that at times feels artificial, and is of course incredibly necessary for his sense of self, as it unfolds. And as I miss my child who did not make it, I sense the closeness of this loss, and the beginning of a sense that the time to try again is coming. Does this mean I forget my lost child, my alive child? No, of course not. They are in me, and I am in them.

Weldon mentions that this truth confirms the fact of a holographic universe. Though she does not source it here, I recognize this concept from my work with Joanna Macy's Work that Reconnects. In this work, we are asked to see with new eyes through the lens of our sense of concern and pain for the world-- to re-vision our planetary crisis as a moment of transformation. This lens shifting needs to happen at all levels, and is refracted out through personal transformation, community transformation, and system change in multiple ways.

So can I see myself and my healing in this holographic light? Can I believe that in my very cells I am holding my children, just as I let them go? Perhaps it's that loss is real, and incomplete as a truth. And perhaps it's that having and connection is real, and incomplete as a truth. I know I will hold my children in my cells, in my heart for the duration. And I know the distance of time and experience will change that closeness, will open it up, and will one day, with my death, be dispersed.

This journey has no fixed point. This cellular knowing confirms the smallness of our connections and the necessary truth of our complex interdependence. I am grateful for the chance I've had to experience this through being a parent, and the many ways I have seen and experienced this in our relationships, movements, and ecological systems.

And until I feel clearer, I will be comforted by the knowledge that somewhere in me, my child still lives.

A Food Post

Because my son actually ATE it, and because I am so proud of my cooking, I will be writing a food post for my Blog-a-day offering today.
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We bought a lamb as our first purchase in this local economy. The very talented Erica Zimmerman at Center Farm contacted me because we had talked about her chickens that we were too late in ordering. She told me she had a couple of lambs that didn't have a buyer, and would I be interested?

I was. Both because a lamb would fit in our normal fridge freezer and because I wanted to support this local farmer, I shelled out $250 for what turned out to be some of the best meat I have made or eaten in my life. This lamb provided our solstice celebration and numerous other meals, and there's still so much left! We have lamb chops, lamburg, a stew meat and a shoulder left. It's been a real adventure to explore meals in various cultural shades, and to resist the lamb and mint jelly I grew up with-- and hated.

from winecountry

A highlight is tonights meal. My son actually ate the meat we put on his plate, a real success. I had four lamb shanks and I knew I had to cook them slowly, so I found a British site that had a good and not too slow recipe for cooking them, in wine and chicken stock, with the mirepoix ingredients cut large for eating at the end of the 2 1/2 hour bake.

I read the comments section in the recipe, and found a reference to mustard mashed potatoes. Mustard mashed potatoes?! I had never heard of this, but quickly found a less cream-filled version and made that-- with double the mustard in the potatoes. Truly yum.

from onehungrymama

And finally, the kale. I make kale maybe 3 times a week, and am really getting good at it. I de-veined the dinosaur kale I love, and I heated up the cast iron skillet real hot. I sliced garlic thing, and fried it until crisp brown with olive oil and salt. Once that was done, I threw in the kale and watched it pop on the skillet, added a bit of water and watched it pop some more, moving the kale around every 20 seconds or so. This makes for a chewy and cooked kale, with a real smoky/creamy garlicness in it. Oh so good.

You know I didn't take a photo because I wanted to eat it so badly. I love cooking, and visit sites a lot looking for good recipes. I also love eating, and quality food, and quality local food. Though the wine was from Chile, and the kale from California, the garlic, onions, potatoes, and lamb were local, so that's something. Here's hoping we can grow enough this coming season to reproduce this meal next winter from our own homegrown bounty.

Won't You Come?

Day 12 of Fun-a-Day. I chose blog-a-day-- for good or ill.

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I borrow the truck from our neighbor aunt and go to purchase three 55 gallon drums, for storing wood ash, feed, what have you. Before I leave, I explain to my son I will be back soon, and he asks, Can't I come?   I slide slowly over iced and sanded roads in the truck with plow attached, making sure to brake before hills to keep my speed down. The sky is spitting snow, steel grey and white. I make it to Cate Farm, a giant of the small farms in these parts, started in 1981, now with 7 high tunnels and wholesale markets locked. I am awed by their set up, their barn, the conversation with this elder farmer where he welcomes me to the neighborhood. I am learning that, though we live 5 miles apart, we are in the same neighborhood.

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We make it late to Quaker Meeting, and I take my son down to the children's room. He is the only child in this small meeting, and a dear and gifted member offers to come down, every week. And he refuses. But this week he asks after her, walks into the silent room, and says, Won't you come? to her. She agrees to meet us down there in a few minutes. But he dissolves, barely makes it through the waiting, and when she comes, he can't hold it together. He is confused, where is his father? Why can't he pray with everyone else? And over-stimulated, and rude. We leave after 45 minutes of weeping and struggle.

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I rush out of the house to make it to a community meeting, and hear, as I close the door, my son talking to his father, asking, Can't I go with mama? I want to get away, be with adults for awhile. I sit in the meeting, trying to pretend like I don't have a child waiting for me at home. The work of listening to community building and evaluating community resources is fascinating and mind expanding. I marvel at the work of years this small community holds in the minds, bodies, hearts, of its members. There is power here, and purpose.

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I come home from the meeting just in time to see my partner and son making a bee line for a far field, in hopes of neighbor children. My son says, Won't you come? and though I think I would rather jog, alone, or read, alone, or do almost anything else, alone, I come. We walk to an empty field and decide to not let this get us down. We walk in the gathering cool up a field with skeletons of harvested corn plants jutting out of the ground. Our sled catches on one, and he asks after it. We see turkey, mouse, cow, deer tracks, and stop to talk about how we know they are what they are. We slide under a wire and see a half dozen cows barely moving in the coming cold. And on to the town trail, the small hills a joy of push and pull of the sled chariot our son is riding.

I have come to be with him, as he wants it, as we should be. In this cold season, on this hillside. He had been asking since 7 this morning, and it took me until 3 pm to listen.

The Better Angels of Our Nature

Day 11 of Fun-a-Day. All month I post a blog-a-day on various subjects. Go figure.
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Having just read and really tried to digest Steven Davison's post What is the Religious Society of Friends for? — Fellowship & the Angel of the Meeting, I want to write a little bit about the role of projection in religious leadership. 

To summarize the very fine post by Steven Davison would be challenging, because it has many aspects, but I'll pull out some of it. In it, he is working to articulate the angel of meeting, and its role for ministers in their leadership within a community, either a home community or in traveling ministry. His lived experience of angels of meetings led him to explore contemporary modeling of how to ascertain this angel and how to engage with the information and communion with these angels for the purposes of moving meeting communities, ministering to their needs, and effectively responding the inner Teacher who calls ministry out of us. But you should read it.

He does a lot of great question generation for working on ascertaining the angel, and makes even better connections to Walter Wink's work. Quoting extensively from Unmasking the Powers about this angel of the church, "[that] exist[s] in, with, and under the material expressions of the church’s life as its interiority. ...,"(p 71, from Davison's post) Davison brings out the ministerial lessons that this angel can offer us.

There is a striking couple of sentences early on in his piece, in defining his experience with these angels, that struck me and has stayed with me.

"I have never experienced the angel of my own meetings, but that is because they are partly a manifestation of myself as one of the meeting’s members. That’s what the angel is, the spirituality of a meeting, and thus a projection, if you will, of all its members. It’s really hard to spiritually commune with your own true self."

Two pieces are really powerful here. First there is this admission that it is really hard to commune with your true self. That is no joke. It’s hard because it is a discipline and practice that some traditions have as their central work and vocation. And second, Steven Davison calls this spiritual manifestation of the angel of a meeting a projection of a true self—or maybe many true selves, as members gather together. This is very interesting to me.

Full disclosure, my bias and perspective is distinctly psychological here. So there’s that. Davison is writing from a theological/spiritual and sociological perspective in his very fine piece.

Projection, from where I am sitting, is about the taking of an aspect of self and placing outside of the self. Projection is a fundamental function of xenophobia and racism. We recognize aspects of the inhuman in ourselves, and we project it outward onto those who are less powerful, or on those we secretly identify with, but need to distance ourselves from, for some reason.

Bread and Puppet: kings and queens
of symbolic projection

Projection is the thing that stalled me most definitely from seeking ordained leadership in a church, before I really understood myself to be a Quaker in the liberal tradition, which does not ordain leaders in their meetings. In seminary, I took a course, a really brilliant course, called Re-visioning the Power of Leadership in the Church. Leave it to my lefty seminary, Episcopal Divinity School, to offer this course. This course was about projection, or at least that's what stays with me 16 years later.

The course was specifically trying to help folks seeking ordination to think critically about projection in their role as pastor in a church.  Unchecked, projection can lead to all kinds of abuses of power. A parishioner in need of succor comes to feel love for a pastor because the pastor is making it possible for her to project a parental feeling onto the pastor. The pastor can seem like a parent to the parishioner. How the pastor handles this projection is crucial for appropriate leadership, as well as empowerment of the parishioner. The truth is the parishioner has the parent within their self, the resources and ability to heal their self. A responsible model of ministry recognizes this and builds towards it pastorally, structurally.

But projection goes both ways. The pastor also projects, also separates aspects of their selves to good or ill effect. In the same situation, a pastor might project their own struggle onto a person coming with a need, making it harder for that pastor to serve that parishioner. Or, the pastor might project a family feeling onto that person, making it easier to connect. I remember a brilliant exercise, where we were asked to identify a mentor or person we looked up to—I chose George Lakey. We were then asked to repeat this in pairs—to say, I love the George Lakey in me, and then proceed to name aspects of that person’s identity as a part of ourselves.  

By doing this, I was able to identify with in a deeper way the parts of myself I had projected onto him. But then there were aspects of him that I was not—male, middle aged, working class, etc. As I said to myself-- I love the man in me, I love the middle aged in me, I love the working class man in me, I smiled, recognizing the dissonance, and the sense of melting limits. It was powerful, playful, and taught me a lot about owning my own projection.

Not that this stopped it at all. I feel like we humans are a bundle of projections, for good or ill. In another post I talk about splitting, an extreme and terrible aspect of this. Projection frightens me. And it's in the fabric of our relating.

But I wonder, what would it look like if we did this—I love the angel in me. I love the wild winged life in me. I love the God talk in me. I love the connection in me. I love the best and worst in me. I love the meeting in me. I love the angel in me. 

Steven Davison’s post did a lot to open up the possibility that projection can be a good thing, a way to name what we put out of ourselves, and the good that can come of it, in a gathered meeting. It also reminded me of the lessons of that class. And although I still feel grounded and committed to listening within for the welling up of the Teacher to speak through me in meeting, I am beginning to feel like the hovering angels of our best nature are there, too, within and without, calling us to commune, and move, and grow together.

Resting Giants

It's Friday, and I am pretty exhausted from my day of parenting and householding. So, for your Friday night enjoyment, I give you, instead of my muddled thoughts, the very fine words of the late and great Amiri Baraka, passed at 79 yesterday. He was, is a giant of poetry, of justice, a voice I heard and try to hear, still, to learn and take in the truth he laid down with every verse. Rest in power.


Ka'Ba
A closed window looks down
on a dirty courtyard, and Black people
call across or scream across or walk across
defying physics in the stream of their will.

Our world is full of sound
Our world is more lovely than anyone's
tho we suffer, and kill each other
and sometimes fail to walk the air.

We are beautiful people
With African imaginations
full of masks and dances and swelling chants
with African eyes, and noses, and arms
tho we sprawl in gray chains in a place
full of winters, when what we want is sun.

We have been captured,
and we labor to make our getaway, into
the ancient image; into a new

Correspondence with ourselves
and our Black family. We need magic
now we need the spells, to raise up
return, destroy, and create. What will be

the sacred word?

source

Stories We Tell Ourselves

I've been getting some great responses to this blog-a-day thing. Folks have been writing comments on posts, thanking me for my writing, generally being supportive. Thanks, all. I gotta say this is not easy, though. I am hitting serious resistance today. But here goes-- Day 9 of Blog-a-Day for the amazing 10th year of the Fun-a-Day project.

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I make up stories for my son all the time. When we are in the car, or when we are in his bed, trying desperately to get him to sleep, or when we are in a restaurant waiting for food and the books we've brought just don't cut it anymore. I love telling him stories, and I think my son likes hearing them, too. My partner is always interested in them. It's fun to make up stories, fantasies of dragons or magic books or friends who live far away. And in these stories I try to give some lesson or idea that I think he needs to hear, that I can't imagine he hears elsewhere. 

Like the story about the very mean dragon. This story has in it a triple gift.  First there are the three friends who now live in Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Vermont, magically moving onto the same street in Philadelphia along with a very mean dragon who will scorch your shrubbery if you mess with him. Second is, well, a story in Philadelphia. Third is the lesson of what happens when people are made fun of and give up on friendship. 

This dragon was once a grand communitarian-- working at food cupboards, participating in civil disobedience, hosting garden parties, running for city council. But a 'friend' started to make fun of him, and told him his breath smelled bad. And not politely and quietly, but in front of all his other friends, and he was laughed at. 

The band of brothers-from-other-mothers write the dragon love letters in various colors while in school together, and the delivery and reading of the letters helps the dragon to realize he doesn't have to give up on friendship. Weekend barbecuing ensues and they live happily ever after.

Why do I feel like this is a good story for my three year old? Maybe because he tells me about the mean games that happened in his old school, or how he was chased by older kids or told he was a girl because of his long hair and love of pink and purple.  I tell that story to my son to explain both the mindlessness of meanness from others, and the chance that there will be good people elsewhere. I also want him to know that his kindness can change things for others.

I am trying to show my son a resilience that I can only make up stories about, that I don't feel all the time. Sometimes it takes a fantasy, a pretend thing, to teach what is most necessarily human, most possibly our best selves. 

Our family doctor has got this down cold. When we went in to see him, the doctor first felt the heartbeat of the plastic frogs my son was playing with before moving on to my son's chest. I took a clue from that and started acting out with a finger puppet the steps of our days together.

I gotta say I wish I was able to motivate myself in this way. Looking at the vastness of possibility and

work waiting for me in starting this farm, I feel overwhelmed! It is too much to look at directly, some days. Okay, today it is too much to look at. 

Maybe because in the business planning class yesterday we talked about types of risk in business. We looked at five types of risk: market, production, financial, legal, and human resources. This way of thinking makes me want to hide inside, or better yet, in a white room with ambient light and no sharp edges anywhere. It stimulates in me the fear of failure that stops many many many amazing people from doing their amazing thing. I want to believe I am not one of those people. 

So I will tell myself a story, maybe. A story about a child, afraid of the dark, who listened to his mother's stories for comfort and calm. And that mother, content in her success at caring for her child, dreamed and grew her life as a model and example of just what joy, what love can do, when put to good use. 

The Mall

Day 8 of Fun-a-Day. I chose blog-a-Day for the month of January.
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Today, during an empty half hour before my farm business planning class started, I decided to take a tour of the local mall, just next door to Montpelier and down the street from the Extension office. I wandered into a bookstore on its last legs, closing at the end of the week, and asked about this suburban oasis. She said, We call it the Hall, referring to it's walkway design. I also think she might have been referring to its emptiness.


There were maybe 40 people there. I walked down the hall and looked in at a vast mattress showroom, almost completely empty of people. I saw one salesman, turned away from the entrance, balancing on one leg as he held his blackberry. He looked as precarious as this mall felt.

There was a Walmart and JC Penney anchoring the hall, and a couple of other chains sprinkled in between local shops. All were pretty much empty. There were some folks eating food, or walking strollers down the hall, but the emptiness, the sense of failure was palpable to me. I did not stay for lunch, or buy anything.

When I was a teacher, the trip to the mall was one of the most popular for the students. Whole busloads of young consumers would pile into the mall, wanting to just get away from the campus that housed them as boarding school students. I couldn't blame them, but wished there was somewhere more real they could go. I would sponsor trips to Ethiopian food and movies in Philadelphia for a taste of freedom and reality. Not the mall.

As I walked out, I had this sense memory of all the hours I clocked in Rhode Island and Warwick Malls in my day. Yes, there were two malls in the town where I grew up, or rather next to the town where I grew up. Before I got my driver's license, these were the places I went with friends or romantic interests. I remember that the mall was the first place where I got to go alone. Maybe I was in 7th grade the first time I went to the mall without an adult? It was so exciting, so exhilarating to be alone with a boy or girl I wanted to kiss, to find a private spot to grab a smooch. This was where I got my ear pierced. This is where I first started to see how void-filled life can be.

Rhode Island Dead Mall
from deadmalls.com

I walked out of there, remembering being a pre-teen, and was struck that this was a dead mall in the making. If you haven't seen this site, it is well worth checking out.  This model of enclosed economically derived community is bankrupt in many ways, and this site documents the places where the mall has died, and what has been left behind.

One of my old stomping grounds is on the site, too. Closed in 2011 because of flooding, at the end the Rhode Island Mall only had 4 stores. I guess what they say is true. You can't go home again.  Thank God.

Maryland Dead Mall
from deadmalls.com

Really, the dead mall is an emblem of both what went wrong and what is right. What is wrong is developing an enclosed and exclusive space for shoppers, where freedom of speech is not allowed--the mall IS private property-- and where music, atmosphere, and all are controlled centrally, and reflect a completely fabricated reality.

But the dead mall is also a symbol of what is right. These photos offer valuable images of the completely unsustainable model and machination that is the mall. They also appeal to the post-apocalyptic in me. They create a palimpsest, where nature is writing over the decay and uselessness that is the mall.

Needless to say, I will not be visiting the mall again.